by Mary Bowers
“Okay, I’ll let you know. She’s probably face-down on my couch right now, sleeping it off.”
I smiled, and we left it at that. I had completely forgotten to ask about Victor Smith, and by the time I remembered, Rita had already hired the man.
Chapter 3
Bernie lives in a ranch house a couple of blocks east of the Whitby House. I was able to walk there within five minutes of parting ways with Chrissie. I knocked on her front door and waited. Her office is at the back of the house; she’s pretty spry, but not exactly a gazelle anymore.
She was wearing a buttercream polyester pants set with some kind of lacy work across the yoke of the top. Very pulled-together. Very fresh.
“Pretty good shindig last night,” she said with an elfin grin. She’d been over to the beauty shop and had her curly white hair fluffed out. She looked like she was wearing a mushroom cloud on her head.
When she noticed me looking at her hair, she patted it and said, “Tony was mad at his boyfriend. He got a little carried away. I tried flattening it with a scarf, but when I took it off half an hour later it just popped right back up. Next time he picks up that hairspray can, I’m going to duck.”
By then we were in the kitchen, and I hiked myself up onto one of the chairs at the breakfast bar.
“Coffee?” she said.
“No thanks. I just had some over at Rita’s.”
“Rita’s, huh?” I could see her getting ready to go all reporter on me. “Nice to have her back in town, but I wonder what a lady like her wants with a house in little old Tropical Breeze. Is she here to stay, do you think?”
“She didn’t say.”
“What’s the story on that Halloween village of hers? Kind of weird for a lady like her.”
“I didn’t ask.”
“Is she going redecorate?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well then what good are you?” she said, leaning against the cooking island and glaring at me.
“I came to ask questions, not answer them. What do you know about Eden O’Sullivan?”
Caught off-guard, Bernie looked at me with her mouth open for a moment, but that didn’t make her look any less intelligent. Bernie never looks unintelligent. “So you heard, too. What got into her last night?”
“What do you mean? What did you hear?”
She lifted an eyebrow. Bernie collects information. She doesn’t give it away for free. After thinking it over she decided to give a little, hoping to get a little.
“She was predicting a lot of gloom and doom, and the customers didn’t like it. All except for Kady Wislop, and she went Goth this summer.”
“Bernie, I don’t think that was Eden at all last night.”
“R-r-really? Tell me more.”
I told her what I’d figured out while standing on Locust Street with Chrissie. When I finished, she thought about it a while.
“There’s a special angel on the shoulder of every girl like Eden,” she said, looking wise. “They ought to be abducted and murdered every night of their lives, but they aren’t. They go out and get stupid drunk, they party with people they don’t know – I’ll never get used to people using ‘party’ as a verb, but language is always evolving, I guess – and they sniff up whatever powdered drug a stranger sells to them, then they dance all night and sleep all day. Every now and then one of them washes up on the beach, but as a general rule, they stagger on home the next day, safe and sound, like they’d been listening to their mothers the night before instead of that little devil sitting on the other shoulder from the angel.”
“That’s the picture I’m getting from her sister, but I’m actually worried. Chrissie doesn’t know where Eden is, and she doesn’t seem to care.”
“Would you?” Bernie asked, giving me a long look with her liquid brown eyes. “Chrissie has always been the responsible one. Now she’s trying to put her daughter through college and keep the bills paid, and here comes Eden wanting a place to sleep it off on the morning after. You can’t blame her for being resentful. I give her a lot of credit for taking care of her little sister the way she does.”
“So you think I’m worried about nothing?” In a way, I was glad to let the whole thing go. I was anxious to get home and get some work done.
After thinking it over for a beat, she said, “I’m meeting Kyle at the diner for the early bird special at four o’clock. If she’s not back by then, I’ll ask him to check it out.”
Kyle Longley was the Flagler County Sheriff.
“Okay. With a party girl like Eden, it probably doesn’t make sense to panic before then. So what’s the lay-out for your Halloween edition? Is the Orphans event going to make the front page?”
“Unless bags of cocaine start washing up on the beach again in the meantime,” she said. (That actually happens every now and then.) She took me back to her office and showed me the article she was working on, along with digital images of the pictures she’d taken.
At the last moment, as I was about to leave, I remembered to ask about Victor Smith.
“Hot stuff,” she said. “Matinee idol type, but he seems nice enough. I think it would be a case of hiring Michelangelo to paint the barn, though. He’s an info technologies guy. You know, software engineering, server maintenance, on-line security. He’d be more likely to set up the Wi-Fi for a corporate campus than go over to the neighbor’s house to make sure the signal reaches the back bedroom.”
“Okay, I’d better tell Rita not to bother him. There’s probably a reasonably intelligent 15-year old somewhere in Tropical Breeze that can handle it for her.”
I left, smiling at the stream of tech-talk Bernie had just reeled off. I wondered how many women who were born in 1930 knew what a server was – and I don’t mean the kind you get in a restaurant.
I got back to Cadbury House in time for lunch, telling myself I could call Rita about the tech guy later. She wouldn’t be calling him yet. It was Sunday. Surely, she’d wait until tomorrow.
When I walked into the house, I smelled wonderful things and heard familiar voices. But before I could get all the way inside, I found myself confronted by Bastet. She was in the entry way, standing with her back arched and her tail up, staring at me wide-eyed, like the classic figure of a witch’s cat.
“What?” I said, coming to a stop as the door hit me from behind.
She hissed. My own beloved cat, the one who decided on her own she was coming to live with me and bypassed the other stray cats in my shelter because she knew she was special – and I let her – hissed at me.
“Taylor?” Michael called from the dining room.
Bastet streaked off, leaving me blinking. I decided that Bastet, like all cats, was answering a call from someone in another universe, or some other thing a mere human could never understand, and went into the house wondering what was for lunch.
Myrtle is a pretty good cook. Unfortunately, she uses the fact that I’m a vegetarian to excuse herself from having to cook for me, unless I’m willing to settle for yet another grilled cheese sandwich. For herself and Michael and whichever volunteers happen to be around, Myrtle can turn out a great potpie, roast chicken or beef stew. I just go ahead and make my own pasta, or throw a frozen vegetarian meal into the microwave. Mostly, I settle for a warmed-over spinach pie from the farmer’s market. We make lunch our main meal of the day, and for dinner we’re pretty much on our own.
Myrtle was setting lunch on the banquet table when I got in. It’s kind of ridiculous to gather around one end of a table as long as a limousine, but if we didn’t, we’d be taking every meal at the breakfast bar, and that just didn’t seem right.
The dining room is a designated area of the Great Room. We still call it that, and with the gallery running around it upstairs and the fieldstone fireplace stacked massively in a corner, it’s not too grandiose a name for it. The room looks very Medieval.
Edson Darby-Deaver was there for some reason, sitting at the table talking to Michael. Next to Ed was my cat spe
cialist, Carlene, looking amused. Ed, as usual, was compulsively and nervously talking, this time about divination.
“It’s called scrying,” he was saying as he adjusted his glasses. “Gazing into a crystal ball, a mirror, or a bowl of water, to conjure visions. Most famously used by Nostradamus, who preferred the bowl of water method, I believe. I discussed the history of the art with Eden the day of the meeting – you remember, Taylor? The meeting where we decided on the elements of the event? – and though she claimed to be a psychic, she was sadly lacking in historical knowledge. I’d classify her as an eyes-open fortune teller.”
“You can say that again,” I said, bringing my spinach pie to the table and sitting down. “She was just about pop-eyed when she told my fortune last night. All I could see was smoke, veils and huge blue eyes. And you should have heard the gruesome fortune she was giving me –“
“No, no,” Ed said, interrupting me impatiently. “’Open eye’ means she knows she’s a fraud. ‘Shut eye’ would mean she honestly believed herself to have paranormal powers. Eden is just doing it for fun.”
“Thank you, Ed,” I said with enough irony for anybody else to get it.
“You’re welcome, Taylor. It’s best to keep these things straight.”
“Yeah, actually what I was going to say was, she gave me a spooky fortune. I came out of the tent expecting to see corpses staggering around.”
Myrtle set a tureen of what looked like gumbo on the table and began serving up bowls of it. She’d already put a basket of cornbread on the table, and I was already eating some. I like the way Myrtle makes cornbread. Kind of sweet, with corn kernels mixed in.
“I heard a lot of complaints,” she said, taking a seat. “One woman refused to let her daughter go in after she heard another girl’s fortune. That’s another five dollars we could have had.”
“They probably used it to buy kettle corn,” Michael said. “We weren’t giving refunds on tickets, and nobody minded, since it was for charity. Now let’s eat. The soup smells wonderful, Myrtle.”
He can always charm her.
After lunch, I started to go to my office, but Edson sidetracked me.
“It’s a fine day,” he said, being hearty and overdoing it. “Would you care to take a walk with me?”
A smile spread across Michael’s face, but he didn’t say anything.
“Sure.”
Once we’d gone out the French doors and across the veranda to the yard, I paused, feeling the sun on my skin. That chilly time in the morning when I’d walked up the lawn to Whitby House listening to Jasper singing seemed like days ago. I stretched like a cat, reveling in the warmth of the afternoon, and thinking about taking a nap if I could get my chores done.
“I saw your friend Jasper today,” I said.
“Oh, yes? He’s well, I hope?” Then, without waiting for an answer, he said, “Shall we go to the cemetery? I’d like a quiet chat.”
Edson likes the cemetery, and on various pretexts has spent the night in the one at Cadbury House looking for ghosts. Since the most impressive monument there is dedicated to Kingsley Danvers Cadbury, a Victorian-era Egyptologist, there have been persistent rumors that treasures from some pharaoh’s tomb were buried with him. Idiotic, of course. If you had treasure, why would you bury it? Ed’s nighttime vigils were much more likely to encounter teenagers on a dare than disembodied spirits.
We passed beneath the iron archway with the Cadbury family name scrolled across it, and sat on a stone bench. Before us were the quiet resting places of three generations of Cadburys.
Cadbury’s house and grounds spread out beneath us in the sparking sunshine, bounded by the river and decorated with tiny islands offshore. In the old barn, there was an occasional bark from the kennel, and feral cats roamed safely around the old kitchen and servant’s cabins across a breezeway from the house. Cadbury House was a heavy, dark oblong with double verandas and a pitched roof. Rows of French doors lined both floors, making it look like a glass-sided house within the boundaries of the porch pillars.
I always enjoyed the view from the cemetery, but Ed was so agenda-driven I didn’t think we were getting the same things out of it. The old-world estate lay below us, bathed in afternoon light and ready for the magazine cover, but all he was experiencing was the cemetery itself.
“About your friend Eden,” he began. “It may turn into a delicate matter, but I believe if we’re going to make this an annual event, we may have to hire a professional. She seems to have performed rather poorly last night. I have a friend . . .”
“Oh, lord, not Purity LeStrange. The psychic from Spuds?” I asked with a touch of exasperation. I’d met her. She’d have gotten a vision of Beelzebub or somebody and ended up tearing the tent down. “Definitely a ‘shut eye’ psychic, right? She really thinks she’s got it.”
“Possibly, possibly. I haven’t yet made my mind up about her. She’s had some uncanny ‘hits.’” He fiddled with his glasses and cleared his throat. “She called me this morning. She’s rather hurt we didn’t think of her.”
“Doesn’t she charge something like a hundred dollars for a reading?”
“She proposed a cut rate.”
“You know we can’t afford even a cut rate. Unless she donates her services for free, we can’t use her.”
“But really, Taylor – Eden O’Sullivan? Surely we can do better.”
“Oh, we’ll find somebody. Everybody understands that this is a charity event. It’s just for fun. Nobody takes the fortune teller seriously.”
He gawped at me. “Really? Then why do they bother?”
I would never be able to make him understand. Instead, I went into the economics of the thing. “We’re charging five dollars a pop, and Orphans is going to get every cent of that five dollars. Marian didn’t even charge us for the tent. So if the psychic from Spuds wants in, she’s going to have to do it for hot dogs and burnt cupcakes like the rest of us, and that’s that.”
I held a hand up because my cell phone was ringing.
“Oh, good,” I said, looking at the Caller I.D. It was Chrissie. “Eden must be home.” I looked at Ed and said, “She never made it home last night.”
Ed didn’t know Eden as well as I was beginning to, and his eyes widened in alarm.
“Hey, Chrissie. Is she back yet?”
“No,” she said. She didn’t exactly sound frantic, but she was finally taking it seriously. “I can’t get ahold of her. After we talked this morning, I started getting uneasy. I made a few calls to her friends, but none of them know where she is. Listen, did you talk to the Sheriff yet?”
“No. Bernie’s seeing him this afternoon. She said she’d mention it to him.”
“Maybe I’m just being a worried big sister, but after you said you didn’t think it was her last night, I went and looked through her things. Her fortune teller costume is gone. It must have been her, but if it wasn’t . . . .”
“She just gave somebody else her costume and asked them to sit in for her. It might be as simple as that.” I was starting to feel guilty for getting her upset and worried, but at the same time, I was beginning to think there was something to worry about.
There was a pause. “I’ve called everybody I can think of, and nobody knows where she is, or has seen her since yesterday morning.”
“Yesterday morning? The event started at 7:30 at night!”
“I know. I can’t find anybody who saw her after about nine in the morning. Her friends got together at Rusty’s the night before, and she got into a fight with another girl. She got a black eye or something.”
“Well, that could be one explanation for why she’d get a friend to sit in for her. A fortune teller with a black eye would sort of kill the air of mystery. These girls were hitting one another?”
“I’m sure they were drunk. Who knows what they were fighting about? Rusty managed to get them apart and the other girl left. Rusty put Eden on his couch and put a bag of ice on her eye. He said she left yesterday morning; he�
��s not sure what time, exactly, but well before noon. I was in St. Augustine all day. I don’t know what was going on at home.” There was a long pause, then she said, “I don’t know what to do.”
I checked my watch; it was already three o’clock. “If that wasn’t her in the tent last night, then nobody has seen or heard from her in about thirty hours. It might be time to call the cops.”
“You’re right. If she’s just out there crashing at somebody’s house, I’m going to kill her,” she muttered. Then she gasped. “Oh! Oh, you know what I mean. That girl . . . .”
“Of course I do.” She sounded more worried than angry by then. “Good luck. Let me know if you need anything.”
I ended the call and put the phone away.
“The fortune teller is missing?” Ed asked.
“I’m sure she’s all right,” I said, in a tone of voice that said I didn’t really think so.
About an hour later, I was working in my office when my phone rang. I looked at the Caller I.D., and it said, “Flagler County Sheriff.”
“Oh, no,” I said. I had a terrible, sinking feeling, and before I could even ask any questions, Kyle cut me off and said me he wanted to see me right away.
Chapter 4
The Sheriff’s office at the south side of Tropical Breeze is kind of a satellite station at a blip on the map called Beverly Beach. A volunteer in a program called “C.O.P.” (Citizens Observer Patrol) usually mans the place during the day, talking call-ins from patrolmen and generally maintaining a presence for the law enforcement, but 911 calls and dispatching is done from the main Sheriff’s Office in Bunnell.
I parked my SUV on the grass in front of the little frame building, and Kyle came out of the door and waited for me. When we got inside, I was surprised to see two men stand up from at a table and watch me walk in with those hooded eyes that police sometimes have. Before we sat down, Kyle introduced us. They were detectives; the older one was Marty Frane, and he seemed to be the senior partner. The other one was Bill Weyer, a young man who’d volunteered at Orphans as a teenager. He’d made detective earlier in the year.
